Why I won't put fiction here

I've been getting a lot of rejections lately for my fiction work, which, according to some writers' resources, means I'm one step closer to getting my next piece published.

Since most of my writing experience comes from journalism, the urge to revisit pieces, to edit, to make changes, to improve, passes quickly once I finish the story. Journalism doesn't lend itself to lingering or self-reflection: You tell the story in the most compelling way, and you move along. Visit almost any news room in the world, and you'll be hard pressed to find a writer who worries about a piece more than a couple of days after it ran in print.

Not so with fiction writers.

The apocryphal tales of fiction writers' obsessions about their work are as profuse as the number of writers. The French realist, Guy de Maupassant, died in an institution supposedly driven to madness by trying to create the perfect story. Franz Kafka left deathbed instructions to his friend, Max Brod, to destroy all of his writing. American author, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote two complete drafts of his most famous work, The Great Gatsby (first titled Trimalchio) and rewrote the novel Tender is the Night so frequently that his editor felt compelled to publish one of the later drafts twenty years after the original was published. Before he shot himself with the same gun that his father used to commit suicide, Hemingway was said to lament that his best writing was a six word short story. Notorious recluse J.D. Salinger allegedly wrote 15 unpublished novels because he felt publishing them would be a nuisance. There is a conceit within each of these legends, and quite possibly more than a modicum of truth as well.

That conceit is likely present in all writers, whether producing fact or fiction or a blending of both, but as a former journalist, I feel a great deal of pressure to publish whatever I write. There's one theory on this need to publish that suggests that writing is a relationship, a conversation between writer and reader, and without the latter half of this binary, nothing remains. I've ignored this blog for a couple of years now, too busy scratching out my fiction to dedicate time to this endeavor, but recently I had the thought that I could just as easily publish my fiction here and hope to develop a following for it. But the problem is that in the arcana of fiction publishing, anything I include here is unlikely to be accepted elsewhere because few publications accept previously published work.

And so while I'd love to use this space for the latest short story to be rejected, I fear that if i ever succeed in publishing something, I won't be able to reuse any work that you'd see here.

So as much as I'd like to entertain my blog's one visitor per year, I'll refrain from it, and instead use this space as I have in the past, for commentary and essay and some amalgam of both.